Leveraging a rolling cross-section design in panel studies to investigate police legitimacy

Monica Gerber and Cristóbal Moya

London School of Economics and Political Science

May 22, 2023

Today

  1. The Study
  2. The rolling cross-section design
    1. Assumptions
    2. x
  3. Objetivo 3

Police legitimacy

  • Police work requires public support to be able to function in a democratic context
  • Beliefs that the police act in procedurally just ways and are legitimate facilitate compliance and cooperation with authorities
  • A socially legitimate police force should require little violence to confront opposition
  • However, the world has seen many cases of violent demonstrations, police violence and human rights violations

Police legitimacy

The Chilean case

  • Chile’s main police force, the Carabineros, was among the most trusted institutions (Dammert, 2019)
  • Yet, recent events of corruption and excessive use of force during the social uprising in October 2019 have produced a serious loss of trust
  • Crisis of legitimacy: proposals of “deep reform” and even the dissolution of the institution
  • Need to understand relationship between police and citizens in Chile during the next crucial years

The rolling cross-section design

  • Cross-section: data obtained at a specific point in time
    • Limited to correlational research
  • Causal inference needs to consider time as a factor (Kenski et al., 2010)
  • Rolling cross-sectional designs (RCS) distribute interviewing within a cross-section in a controlled (random) way over time (Johnston & Brady 2002; Kenski et al., 2010)
    • Total sample is divided into multiple replicates (smaller random samples)
    • Replicates are assigned to be interviewed at different intervals of times

The rolling cross-section design

Advantages

  • Time as an opportunity
  • Can capture naturally-occuring expected and unexpected events
  • Avoids missatributing effects to the wrong events
  • Flexibility: information can be divided into different time periods for analysis
  • Data can be analised as single cross-section, repeated cross-section or aggregated into time series
  • Little conditioning of participant responses

Disadvantages

  • Not able to capture individual change
  • Small sample size to study individual days
  • Response rates may be lower do to strict protocols to release samples

The rolling cross-section design

Example 1

The rolling cross-section design

Example 2

The rolling cross-section design in the context of a panel design

  • Panel studies: individuals are interviewed at two or more points in time
    • Generally better than cross-sectional designs for causal inference (Kenski et al., 2010)
    • Possible to make inferences about changes in attitudes or behaviours at the individual level (RCS by itself is not able to capture change)

A rolling cross-section panel design

Panel

  • the design